The rise of the internet and the world wide web has made the sharing of information an attainable goal. But compatibility between computers remains a concern. Many computers cannot read each other's files, because of differences in format. When a web site wants to provide information in streaming and portable files to its clients, it has to prepare different versions of the files for each different type of computer that may need to access the files.
Software can help to reduce this problem, in that the data can be left in a platform-independent, proprietary data format. Different viewers are then used to read the document on different computer platforms. But this solution introduces its own problems. To be able to read the document, the user has to install the viewer on his computer system. Without the viewer, the user is unable to read the document. And once installed, the viewer stays resident on the user's system. This means that even when the user is done reading the document, a footprint is left on the user's system: the viewer. Subsequent updates can obsolete the stored view, requiring download of an updated viewer.
In addition, the current viewer technology is dependent on the user requesting the file. Although “push technology” has been around for some time, viewing software is entirely dependent on the user selecting the document for download. Currently, there is no technology that supports that automatic delivery of new documents to the user.
Accordingly, a need remains for a platform-independent viewer that leaves no footprint on the user's system and that can automatically deliver a new document to the user that addresses these and other problems associated with the prior art.